I finished the lessons last night so am now feel ready to start trying to make stuff. tl;dr I like it!
I think most people here interested in this will have played Mario Maker so that gives a good point of comparison. Mario Maker is a robust level editor for Mario levels. Game Builder Garage is a pared back visual programming language. MM is, pretty much, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. GBG is more complex than that, and while game arrangements in the programming space have some relation to how they appear when playing, it's abstracted and not true all the time.
With MM you can pretty much immediately jump into making levels, playing around with all the objects available and being able to immediately discover and understand them. GBG requires you to do some actual learning and puzzling. Just getting things to work as you've placed them is non-trivial. The guided lessons then are invaluable, but thankfully they are very good at working up from the basics.
So yeah, as you might expect it's a tool that demands more from the player. It's less immediately fun, although it still has Nintendo charm woven through it so it's never dry. Making stuff as you imagine it is difficult, but you are free to imagine many more things.
I shot through the interactive lessons as I was really keen to get to 3D development. The lessons do feel necessary though (and I say that as a programmer in my day job) so the several hours of commitment to get through them is sort of the barrier to entry for really getting into the making side of the game.
That's all about making though. If you're just interested in playing games others have made though, is it good for that? Short answer, no. From what I can tell the only way of even finding levels online is to know their code (or the creator's code). There's not even a list of popular levels or random levels like Mario Maker has. There is basically no online infrastructure at all.
If you're unsure, try out the demo. It takes you through the first interactive lesson, that will give you a good enough idea of what the game is like!
OrangeRKN wrote:If you're unsure, try out the demo
It won't download for me Some kind of weird error. There's nothing wrong with my internet connection.
That's the awesome bug introduced in Nintendo's last firmware update a few days ago that causes downloads to fail.
The only way around it seems to be to 1. Do nothing 2. Randomly try repeatedly at different times or let it sit on the home screen until it downloads by itself.
Had this with flashback for 80p, it finally downloaded last night so maybe it's been fixed.
OrangeRKN wrote:If you're unsure, try out the demo
It won't download for me Some kind of weird error. There's nothing wrong with my internet connection.
I had this with the demo and the main game, didn't realise it was a widely reported bug. What fixed it for me was to cancel the download then try restarting it a couple of times. Didn't take more than a minute for either. (I knew to cancel the download because there was no icon or game name)
Some kind of weird error. There's nothing wrong with my internet connection.
